Kate Payne
November 20, 2003

Jewish American Literature

         The Jewish culture is a lasting and powerful one that has a great impact on its own people and everyone that comes into contact with it.  The Jewish culture is a written culture, with the Old Testament and other ancient works standing as their history books.  This respect and importance placed on literacy has helped to make Jewish culture powerful.  The Jewish people have always been a nomadic people, and this too has helped them become prosperous and long-lasting as a group. 

The difficulty in recognizing the Jews as a solidified group is that the definition of the word “Jew” is very dependent upon the context in which it is found.  A technical definition would claim that anyone born of a Jewish mother is a Jew.  However, others would claim that only those who follow the Jewish religion are truly Jewish.  Still others would say that being Jewish has nothing to do with religious beliefs and practices. 

As this debate is endless with no definitive answer, so then the question of what is Jewish American literature also becomes endless. In David Brauner’s book, Post-War Jewish Fiction, the author describes the situation as having two distinct factions; there are scholars who feel that only literature that reflects Jewish culture is Jewish American literature, rather than any literature written by a Jewish American.  As that debate too is unending, for our purposes we will say that any writing by a Jewish American can be considered relevant; however, most of the pieces reflective of this course and its goals will be literature that reflects the Jewish experience in America, which many consider to be merely yet another “host land” to the Jews.

There have been many Jewish authors in America, often they are taught in classes, without any note that they are Jewish.  E.L. Doctrow, Gertrude Stein, Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger works are taught in courses throughout the country and unless the piece deals directly Jewish culture, it is often left unmentioned.  The fact that an author is Jewish may not seem of great importance at first glance, but the immense force of Jewish culture on American culture can not be dismissed.  Jewish Americans have settled into mainstream culture in such a way that they are undetectable. 

This was especially true of Jewish American authors before WWII.  Irving Howe, considered one of the most famous Jewish American writers ever, describes this pre-war Jewish attitude,

“People like me tended to subordinate our sense of Jewishness to cosmopolitan culture and socialist politics.  We did not think well or deeply on the matter of Jewishness- you might say that we avoided thinking about it.”  Many of Howe’s compatriots voiced similar feelings.  In 1944, Alfred Kazin wrote, “I learned long ago to accept the fact that I was Jewish without being a part of any meaningful Jewish life or culture.”  These comments reflect the ideas that many second and third generation Jewish Americans held.  Immigrant narratives had been dealing with the desire to assimilate into mainstream American culture, and that desire was seen by some as a danger to both Jewish American culture and literature.  At several different points, Jewish American literature seemed to be threatened.  Some critics believe that WWII was a blessing in disguise for Jewish writers.  Howe himself said, in comparing Southern literacy with Jewish literacy, “in both instances, a subculture finds its voice and its passion at exactly the moment it approaches disintegration.” 

 However, after WWII Jewish American authors seemed to have a strong desire to reconnect with their heritage.  Kazin even wrote a memoir in 1978 called New York Jew.  The immigrant narrative saw resurgence in popularity at this time.  Dorothy Bilik writes, “The immigrant, whether or not he is a survivor, can be seen as the embodiment of the history and tradition of European Jews…remnants of a vanished European Jewish culture, the immigrant-survivors in America bridge the historical and psychological distance between the modern Jewish American writer and the somber events that the writer confronts through the fictive imagination (5).

Jewish American literature can be seen as following a similar pattern of narrative as the American Immigrant narrative that we have studied throughout the semester.  Even if the Jewish author was born in America, the same pattern follows, much as we have discussed with other minority groups.  The relationship between Jewish Americans and the dominant culture seems to be more settled, but that can mask the underlying issues.  While Jewish Americans have been successful in many ways, what has been lost in the quest for assimilation?  Many would claim that their religion is what has suffered, but there is no clear-cut answer.  The question though, what has been lost, can be seen as an underlying backbone to much Jewish American literature.

The Jewish culture is a literate one.  This history of literacy is evident in their adaptability.  Most nomadic people have oral histories, and the outside world has little knowledge of their history or beliefs.  The fact that the Jewish people have been both nomadic and literate sets them apart and pushes the literature that comes from them to a different level. Looking at Jewish American writers and their works allow one to recognize the impact of the culture on its members and the dominant culture in America as well. 

Short Biographies of Several Jewish American authors: 

Saul Bellow:

Saul Bellow, a Jewish American author, was born in Lachine, Quebec on June 10, 1915. He was brought to Chicago at the age of nine and was educated at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. He taught at the University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton, the University of Chicago and Boston University. In 1976, he won the Nobel Prize in literature "for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work." http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/APS/jewishamerican/biography.html

Irving Howe:

Irving Horenstein in 1920, the son of immigrants who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. A socialist activist even before he entered the City College of New York, Howe gravitated quickly to the Trotskyist wing of the Young Peoples Socialist League, becoming one of its national leaders after it broke from the Socialist Party to become the youth group of the Socialist Workers Party. On the City College campus he was a main leader of the Trotskyist students, full of fiery rhetoric and eager for militant action not so different from some of the most extreme {but nonterrorist) elements of the New Left of the 1960s. During the Spanish Civil War he would jump up on the tables in the alcoves to give speeches. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/wald-on-howe.html

1920-93, American literary and social critic, b. New York City. From his early days as a Trotskyist to his later (and lifelong) position as a democratic socialist, Howe criticized Stalinism and left-wing totalitarianism. His roles as a cofounder (1954) of Dissent magazine and frequent contributor to such journals as The Partisan Review,The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books made him influential in the New York literary world. His many books include William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1952), Politics and the Novel (1957), The Critical Point (1974), World of Our Fathers (1978), Socialism and America (1985), and A Critic's Notebook (1994). Howe, who was a professor at the City Univ. of New York, also played a key role in introducing Yiddish literature to America. http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/H/Howe-I1rv.asp

Norman Mailer:

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. Mailer grew up in Brooklyn and began attending Harvard University in 1939, it was while at university that he became interested in writing, he published his first story when he was 18. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1943.

Drafted into the army in 1944, he served in the Philippines, as a rifleman in a reconnaissance outfit with the Twelfth Armoured Cavalry regiment from Texas until 1946. Just before enrolling in the Sorbonne, in Paris, he wrote The Naked and the Dead(1948) based on his personal experiences in World War II, it was both a critical and commercial success and hailed by many as one of the finest American novels to come out of WWII.

Other highlights in a long and distinguished career include : The White Negro , a sociological and semi-autobiographical essay, one of his best pieces, in the authors own opinion. Advertisements for Myself, a collection of the best of Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the 40's and 50's. Why Are We in Vietnam, a soul-searching novel on the place of violence in the Vietnam Years.

A major figure in post-war American literature, Mailer's other credits include writing, directing and appearing in a number of motion pictures.

Norman Mailer has been married six times and has nine children. http://www.iol.ie/~kic/

Anzia Yezierska:

An immigrant from a town near Warsaw, Yezierska grew up on New York's Lower East Side with her father, a talmudic scholar, her mother, who supported the family through menial jobs, and her eight siblings.  She worked at a young age and earned a scholarship to Columbia University's Teacher's College.  In 1913, after teaching for several years, she began to write fiction. She divorced twice, had one daughter and had a romantic relationship with a philosopher John Dewey. In the 1930's, after refusing a lucrative screen contract because of the distance from home block her writing, Yezierska worked for the Works Progress Administration's Writers Project in Manhattan.  In the last decades of her life, she documented the plight of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York. http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/biography/yezierska.html

Gertrude Stein:

The fifth and youngest child of the Daniel and Amelia Stein family, Gertrude was born on February 3, 1874 into upper middle class surroundings in Allegheny, Pennsylvania.

When she was 3 years old the family moved to Vienna and then on to Paris before returning to America in late 1878.

Her father moved the family to Oakland, California soon after their return. Her brother Leo, 2 years her senior, and Gertrude found like interests and became close allies through much of their early lives. Gertrude was 8 when she made her first attempt at writing. Reading became an obsession for her beginning with Shakespeare and books on natural history. Gertrude's love affair with words would later reveal itself in her own works. In school she was fascinated with the structuring of sentences.

With philosophy and psychology courses behind her, Gertrude decided on a career in medicine and enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. She later studied medicine in Europe and eventually dismissed the whole idea. Wanderlust had captured her attention as she traveled through Italy, Germany, and England...living for awhile with brother Leo in London.

She returned to America to live with friends in New York. It was here that she wrote her first novel "Q.E.D.". It would, for some reason, be lost for 30 years and not be published until 4 years after her death under the title of "Things As They Are".

Leo Stein moved to Paris and took up residence at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Gertrude joined him in 1904, and would not touch foot upon American soil again for 30 years... soon becoming a legend in her own time. http://ellensplace.net/gstein3.html

Discussions of major themes in Jewish American literature:

Jewish American literature concerns itself with themes that are common throughout immigrant literature.  However, the Jewish literary history and their more complete assimilation into the dominant American culture bring a different depth to the issue. The Jewish American authors struggle with the same issues that are faced by other immigrant writer and the following generations, but they also deal with a more continued sense of assimilation and resistance, as their old culture continues to survive.  Most immigrant cultures lose much of their old religion, language and culture, but the Jews have had such an impact on American culture that the immigrant narrative never has a chance to come full circle or have any closure, rather it continues to repeat and expand as the Jews continue to have to balance their two cultures, American and Jewish that interlock and overlap, but also conflict with each other. 

Jewish American literature and American Jews in general have impacted American literature so much that it is hard to separate them or to merely extract Jewish literature from American literature.  The immigrant narrative, the struggles that merging cultures face are prevalent themes in Jewish American literature and as Jewish authors reconnect with their history they reconnect to literacy and thus continue the cycle of Jewish literature, which Jewish American authors are now a part of.  America has become a part of Jewish history and literacy as much as Jewish literature has become a part of America.